Said a local teacher in disgust, “When schools do well, they
say it’s the principal. When they do
poorly, they blame it on the teachers.”

I never thought of it that way. But here’s something I do know from long experience:

Good teachers will continue to be good despite a weak
principal.

Poor teachers will be worse with a weak principal.

And here are the corollaries:

Good teachers will do even better with a good principal.

Poor teachers will do better with a good principal.

Let’s look at these ideas.
A strong, knowledgeable principal sets the tone for the building. She makes her expectations clear regarding
academic performance, discipline, professional standards. She leads byexample, exhibiting fairness
with all employees, timeliness, honesty.
She supports her teachers. In
short, she runs a tight ship.

Good teachers thrive under these circumstances. Their work is supported and appreciated, and
they know that any innovative ideas or practices they come up with will be met
with enthusiasm. Poor teachers, on the
other hand, know that they won’t be able to slide – that the principal will
hold them accountable for the success of their students and will call them on
less than professional behavior. In
addition, the strong principal will find ways for weak teachers to improve, not
only through supervision, but through specific inservices to address
weaknesses.

All in all, the entire school benefits by the presence of a
strong, competent principal.

Now let’s look at the weak principal. Good teachers will survive, although they
will not prosper as they might have with new ideas. They tend to turn inward, to turn to other
good teachers in the building for support.
They close their classroom doors and deal with discipline problems by
themselves. In short, they still do a
good job – it’s just in their nature – but they aren’t able to develop all the
potential they have.

Poor teachers, on the other hand, never have an opportunity
to improve. And knowing they can get by
with as little as possible, that’s what they do – as little as possible. If there is no disciplinary support from the
principal, poor teachers don’t just handle it themselves. Instead, they let it slide or they overreact
and make things worse. Attendance is
poor – both the teachers’ and the kids’.
In short, the entire morale of the building suffers.

Knowing all this, I remain baffled by the silence of
principals during this period of reform.
The focus has all been on teachers.
Some have even gone so far as to suggest that principals aren’t really
needed – that teachers themselves could just share the various duties of
ordering supplies, making sure payroll was ready, etc. As if that’s what the principal’s job is.

Frankly, in my experience, most teachers want strong
leadership. They want everyone to be
accountable. They want competent
supervision and they want a shared vision for their school. I’ve never seen a truly remarkable school
without strong leadership.

So until we actually see some leadership from principals –
the middle management people who have to make things work on a daily basis – I
honestly don’t see how reform is going to take hold. Instead, it’s going to be thousands of
teachers milling about, arguing with legislators, pundits, businesspeople, and
others who have no idea what it takes to make a school work well day to day.

The problems in public schools are fixable – school by
school, teachers and principals working together. It’s like a symphony and a conductor. Beautiful music isn’t made by music critics
and donors.

The Chicago teachers’ strike is over, leaving educational
pundits to debate what it all meant and what it might mean for the future.

Writing in the LA Times last Saturday, Sandy
Banks offers a reasoned approach to both questions. While teachers insisted that their strike was
about respect for teachers and about kids’ welfare, Banks suggests that it was
also about “market reforms” that tie salaries and jobs to how well students
perform. In other words, it was about
job security and accountability.

“Market reforms, “ says Banks is “public school lingo” for
tying student performance to teacher evaluation. Of course, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel isn’t
the only big city supervisor who believes that test scores should be part of
teacher evaluation. As Banks notes, here
in LA John Deasy, LA Unified School District superintendent, believes that the
school district, as the employer, should be able to design a teacher evaluation
system without union approval.

While many teachers object to including test scores in their
evaluations, Banks says that the handwriting is on the wall. Chicago teachers will, in fact, have test
scores as part of their evaluation. It
will be phased in and the total percentage will be less than the mayor wanted
(to my mind a good thing), but it will still
be part of how teachers are
judged. And for those who still protest
about the fairness of using test scores, Banks asks, “How do we find a way to
measure good teaching, reward it, spread it through the ranks?”

In an article I wrote earlier this year for the NYS ASCD
publication, I argued the same thing.
Using test scores as more than 30% of a teacher’s evaluation is problematic
given all of the variables that can occur.
Test scores should be just one measure.
How can we design a clear, valid tool that is easy to use and doesn’t
contain 25 different categories? We have
the intelligence and the experience in the field to do this. Teachers and principals know what good
teaching looks like. Why can’t they work
together to develop a workable format?

I have to fault state legislatures and other officials for
taking an idea with promise and turning it into a thoughtless mandate. Parents have the right to know how their kids
perform on standardized tests and which teachers have a track record of helping
kids perform well. It is not the only
measure, but it is an important one. To
all of the folks who complain constantly about reform, let me ask you: Which teacher do you want your personal child
to have? The one whose students score
well on standardized tests or the one whose students are perpetually last?

As Banks notes, it’s true that kids do better in school when
parents are involved, when they feel safe, and when their home life is free
from disruption. But some schools
perform well even when conditions are poor.
So we can’t continue to use the excuse of poverty to cover a school’s
failure. If teachers can’t overcome home
conditions, why even teach? Why bother?

Banks says, “It’s time for district leaders to listen – and
for teachers to talk about something more than how hard it is to teach urban
kids, with their academic shortcomings and chaotic lives..” Both sides need to abandon their defensive
positions and come together to problem solve for the good of their students.

It’s about salary.
It’s about test scores. It’s
about evaluation. It’s about
respect. It’s about tenure. It’s about personalities. It’s about power.

If you followed the news about the Chicago teachers’ strike
you know that at some point all of these ideas and more were put forward by
each side. “You have a situation where
teachers feel totally and completely disrespected,” said Randi Weingarten,
president of the American Federation of Teachers. No hyperbole there. For his part, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel
called the strike “a strike of choice.”
None there either.

Alex Kotlowitz wrote
in the NY Times, “One teacher told me last week that if you asked 30 of his
colleagues why they were striking, you’d get 30 different answers. Their explanations varied: they
wanted respect, they opposed school
reform, they feared the privatization of education, they wanted to teach Mayor
Rahm Emanuel a lesson.” But Kotlowitz believes
that the real underlying reason for the strike is this: Teachers, whether they know it or not, are
rebelling against the idea that they alone are responsible for resolving all
the issues facing kids.

Paul Tough, in his new book How Children Succeed says that tenure reform has become “the
central policy tool in our national effort to improve the lives of poor
children.” Of course, he says, the truth
is much more complex. Unfortunately,
it’s easier and more convenient for both teachers and reformers to pretend that
it isn’t.

I’ve spent the last couple of days in Yellowstone National
Park. The scenery, of course, is
spectacular, even surreal. But in 1988
the park experienced an enormous wildfire that decimated thousands of acres of
forestland. For the first time the Park
Service made the decision to allow the fire to burn for a while as a natural cycle of
forestry. The Park Service believed that
science indicated that that suppression of wild fires stunted new growth by
protecting old and diseased trees.
Forest fires were the natural way to remove those trees, promote new
growth, and increase natural habitats and food supplies for wildlife. The decision to let the forests burn led to a
public outcry that resulted in Congressional hearings about the Forest
Service’s decision. Today, although the
east entrance to the park reveals thousands of charred trees still standing,
the last 25 years have proved the decision was the correct one as new growth
has come back and wildlife has increased.
Still, it was a painful decision to live through and today the Park
Service has specific guidelines regarding suppression of wild fires.

Change is hard. The
Park Service could have avoided or at least diminished the public outcry if it
had worked together with lawmakers to study the science and make good judgments
involving everyone. The same is true of
teachers and public officials.
Inflammatory rhetoric helps no one; working together does. The struggle in Chicago isn’t about kids;
it’s about power. The fire for reform
burns hot, but so does the desire to suppress it. The forests will return, they say, in about
100 years. We don’t have that kind of
time.

I have had the ill luck to be involved more than once with
committees charged with writing a mission statement for their respective organizations. Writing anything by committee is frustrating
enough, but writing a mission statement is a particularly dreadful way to spend
an afternoon. The problem is that people
often want to include in the statement grandiose ideas modified by strings of
complex clauses covering every aspect of the organization. A school group I worked with once came up
with a mission statement that looked something like this:

The mission of Grand
High School is to ensure that all of our students will graduate with competence
in every subject and will be model citizens who will improve the world with
their insights, concern for others, hard work, and energy which will result in
world peace, a cure for hunger, and a World Series win for the Cleveland
Indians.

OK, I made up that last part about the Indians. But here’s the thing: The simpler, the better when it comes to
mission statements: Our mission is to graduate 95-100% of our students and they will be
able to read, write, use mathematics, reason and understand the
responsibilities of citizens in a democracy. The end.
My favorite mission statement ever was that of Jefferson Community
College in Watertown, NY: Teaching and
learning. That’s it. That’s our mission.

I suspect that the most important part of developing a
mission statement is the process itself, forcing
participants to actually think
about their work. And I’m beginning to
wonder whether the same will hold true of what
Mike Schmoker describes as “those complex, bloated, evaluation templates
that are now being dumped on teachers and administrators – templates with
multiple sections and subsections written in what is almost a second language.

Schmoker points out that before evaluation takes place, we
need to be sure that a solid curriculum is in place. After that, we want to be sure that teachers
are actually implementing it. Then, in a
random visit to the classroom, we can determine if

a)
Kids are engaged.

b)
The purpose of the lesson is clear and kids know
what it is.

c)
Instruction is presented in various ways in
short segments.

d)
Students have the opportunity to practice what
was taught while the teacher monitors progress.

I would add to these criteria that feedback has to be
specific and immediate, a conversation between the teacher and the
observer. And most important,
supervision must be ongoing, not a planned dog and pony show once a year or
maybe even less frequent.

I think that Schmoker is right – that these evaluation
systems are too unwieldy to be useful.
In addition, we may have to admit that supervisors may lack the skill,
the knowledge, and the commitment to the process necessary for the systems to
work.

So it will be interesting to see what happens to these plans
within the next five years. Will they be
essentially compromised as they are implemented? Will they be revised and simplified? Or will they, like countless mission
statements, become meaningless within a few years?

Two years into my first superintendency the school board
decided to embark on a building project, the first for the district in many
years. Besides adding elementary
classrooms, the project included tearing down the old high school gym and
building a new, modern facility with a large stage at one end as well as new
locker rooms and weight rooms. The old
gym was over 50 years old and was actually smaller than regulations required to
host sectional competitions.

Because I didn’t know any better, I thought the best place
to present the project for the first time would be the local senior citizens
center after their monthly dinner. The
senior center was packed that evening, and as they were finishing up their
coffee and pie, I got my PowerPoint presentation ready to roll. I was sure that seniors, above all people,
would support the project because they understood the value of education in a
democracy. In addition, some of them had
grandchildren in the schools.

Ten minutes into the presentation it became clear that it
would take more than a little pie to sweeten up this audience. Some who had attended the local schools as
students said that the buildings were good enough for them 50 years ago and
they ought to be good enough for kids today.
Others said that they already paid for their own kids’ education and
parents today should pay for their kids.
Still others said that they didn’t understand why education cost so much
more these days than it used to. Finally,
one old gentleman towards the front summed it all up. “Listen, girlie,” he said, “a lot of us are
on a fixed income and can’t pay any more school taxes. Enough said.”

Well, besides having to listen to my board members call me
“girlie” for the next few months, I had to admit that I learned something, however
painful, that evening. I had seriously
misjudged the community’s retirees in terms of their attitudes towards local
education.

Education Weekreports
that according to the census, seniors currently outnumber students in more than
900 counties across the United States.
Predictions are that by the middle of this century people 65 and older
will outnumber people 17 and under as they currently do in Europe and Japan. School districts required to put their
budgets up for vote in their communities will find that they will have to
address the issues and attitudes of this older block of voters just as my
district had to.

While seniors, like all citizens, add to the tax base of a
community, it turns out that they tend to favor lower taxes and spending on
schools, according to professor Deborah Fletcher of Miami University of
Ohio. This development, of course, has
prompted many districts to try to increase senior interest and involvement in schools. In my district, for example, we instituted
grandparents’ breakfasts and invited seniors to music program rehearsals. We recruited seniors as classroom volunteers,
and we gave free senior passes to sports activities. In my budget presentations before the vote, I
often spoke about how strong schools increased property values. Still, as a 2010 study for the National
Bureau of Economic Research found, “the higher the proportion of seniors in a
community, the lower the support for public school funding, regardless of how
deep their roots went in the community.”

The building project referendum didn’t pass the first time
around even with almost 90% state aid, but a scaled back version passed the
second time. We learned that we could,
in fact, gain some retirees’ support, but we had to show how kids benefitted
from school taxes and we had to demonstrate that we knew how to be frugal. Still, we didn’t convince all senior voters,
especially those who were first in line to vote when the polls opened. As the retiree population increases in school
districts, it will create yet another challenge for school funding in states
where citizens vote on the school budget.

I had another topic in mind for today’s blog, and then I
read Bill Lichtenstein’s opinion
piece in the Sunday NY Times. “A
Terrifying Way to Discipline Children” describes his daughter’s experience of
being placed in a “seclusion” or “time out” room when she was in kindergarten
in Lexington, Massachusetts six years ago.

You cannot read this story without anguish and anger. Lichtenstein’s child had been place in a
locked broom closet almost daily for three months for up to an hour at a time
for offenses that ranged from behavioral issues to not following
directions. The parents were not notified
until the final isolation when they were called to come and pick up the little
girl. It was then that they learned that
the child had been locked in the close five times that morning alone. The aftermath included long-term therapy for
the child and litigation against the school district.

Lichtenstein cites Department of Education data indicating
that nearly 40,000 students were placed in restraining or isolation rooms
during the 2009-10 school year. He adds
that the majority of children place in these rooms had learning, behavioral, or
developmental needs and that a disproportionate number were African-American or
Hispanic students. However, as I review
the DOE
survey of states’ guidelines regarding seclusion rooms, it appears to me
that the number is probably significantly higher since some states had no
guidelines in 2011. There are no federal guidelines either, although
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan wrote regarding the survey that there was
“no evidence that using restraint or seclusion is effective.”

New York is one state with fairly specific
regulations for the use of such rooms.
Seclusion rooms are to be used only for emergency situations and not as
punishment. Except in emergency
situations, use of rooms such as these must be part of the child’s behavioral
plan agreed to by the student’s parents.
The room must meet specified standards for size, time is limited, and
the child must be supervised at all times.
And even then some schools have been charged
with violations of the regs.

I never worked in a school district with a time out room,
but I remember a tour through a neighboring high school that contained
one. The district employed an aide to
supervise the children sent to the room.
New York State requires that the aide be trained, but I remained
unconvinced that despite the state regulations, that this was a procedure that
was good for children. Despite the regs,
there is too much opportunity for abuse.

When I think about Lichtenstein’s five-year-old daughter, I
have to ask, didn’t anyone intervene?
Didn’t anyone say, hey, this is
just a little kid. We shouldn’t be doing
this. Let’s call the parents. There must be something else we can do. This is breaking my heart. And where was the principal? You have to wonder about a school culture in
which putting a five-year-old girl into a locked broom closet repeatedly is
acceptable adult behavior. These folks shouldn’t be allowed to work with any
kids. It’s criminal.

First year teachers are the largest single group of
educators this year according
to USA Today. Some 200,000 new
teachers joined the professional ranks this year, up from about 65,000 ten
years ago.

Numerous studies suggest that roughly half of all teachers
leave the classroom after five years. In
addition, boomers are retiring, so today slightly more than 50% of all teachers
have ten years’ experience or less.

So what does this mean for our kids’ education? Well, having a large number of rookies in the
classroom can be either a good thing or a bad thing depending on what plans the
school district and administration have to assist new teachers.

For example, does your district have a mentoring program for
new teachers, pairing each rookie with a competent veteran? If so, is it a formalized program with
planned meeting times and opportunities for the veteran to observe the rookie’s
classroom and give feedback? Or is it an
informal, and therefore, ineffectual arrangement?

Does the principal plan to provide steady but unthreatening
supervision for new teachers? Will he make
it a priority to do a walk-through of classrooms every day? Will he be visible in the halls? Will he be available to provide assistance
and answer questions? Will he be a
support for the classroom management issues facing nearly all new teachers? Will the principal or his designee help new
teachers learn how to work with parents and not be intimidated?

And what about extra duties?
Will the principal protect the new teacher’s time so that he can spend
the first year learning and practicing the art and science of his profession or
will the principal pile on additional duties like coaching or advising major
activities? Will the principal give the
new teacher time to grow? Will she give
the new teacher honest feedback that isn’t punitive?

New teachers can bring enthusiasm, excitement, and fresh
ideas to a school. But without strong
administrative support and collegial mentoring, the new job can be
overwhelming. We know that teacher
preparation programs rarely offer enough practice before a new teacher has a
classroom of her own. On the job
training continues to be an important aspect of teacher effectiveness.

So whether these 200,000 new teachers learn the job and are
still around after five years really depends on the school district, the
administrators, and the district plan. Administrators
need to commit time and energy to helping new teachers become successful. We owe it to our kids to make every teacher’s
first year a strongly supported professional growth experience.

It wasn’t Dirty Harry telling those questionable jokes at
the GOP convention last week. It was
disgruntled Walt Kowalski from Gran
Torino looking like a stand-up wannabe who still orders kids to get off his
lawn. All in all, a cringe-worthy
talk-to-the-chair moment.

Internet jokesters responded with images of lots of
different folks (and animals) talking to various empty chairs. Even Jenna Wolfe on Saturday’s Today show joked about the empty chair
next to her, and Stephen Colbert introduced an empty chair as a guest.

Imaginary conversations with other people aren’t unusual, although
most people converse silently in their heads without pretending the person is
sitting next to them. Sometimes it’s
about things you wish you would have said to someone; sometimes it’s practice
for a conversation you know you’re about to have. Sometimes it’s a conversation you know you’ll
never have, but wish you could. We’ve
probably all done that.

In that last category I would put my own imaginary conversation
with Patricia Wright, Superintendent of Public Instruction for Virginia. Let’s pretend she’s sitting in a chair next
to me in my office:

Me: As a former
school superintendent in another state, I understand that the NCLB goal of
having 100% of public school students proficient in English and math by 2014 –
in just two years – is unrealistic. So
it makes sense to extend the time frame.
But help me understand why it’s acceptable to you and the state school
board to set different achievement goals based on race or economic status for
Virginia’s public school students.

Dr. Wright:

Me: I understand that
Virginia has
agreed to revise its new goals for student achievement under the NCLB
waiver, making the timetable more aggressive.
But you’re sticking with the lower goals for Hispanic and black students,
claiming that those goals are more realistic.
What message do you think that sends to Hispanic and black school
children?

Dr. Wright:

Me: Did you consider
setting the same goals for all groups and intensifying and diversifying
instruction for underachievers?

Dr. Wright:

Me: I know that
Virginia isn’t the only state that is setting goals based on race and economic
level. In fact, 27 of 33 states
receiving waivers have done the same. That doesn’t make it right, of course. How do you respond to black leaders who
object to the low expectations for children of color?

Dr. Wright:

Me: Would you be
willing to talk to an integrated group of Virginia students and explain to them
why you expect less from some and more from others?

Dr. Wright:

And there you have it, folks. Virginia has agreed to set new, more aggressive
goals to shorten the education gap in six years. Six years.
Not, mind you, to close the gap between minorities, but to halve it. In the meantime, the push for charters and
vouchers continues. If lowering academic
expectations based on ethnicity is part of Virginia’s public school ethos, poor
and minority children may be better off in other settings.